OpenOffice.org is a free and open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation utility, database builder, and math and drawing apps. This week the OpenOffice.org team launched version 3.2 which features a number of updates including:

• Improved startup speed
• Support for Microsoft Office 2007 files
• Encryption support for Microsoft Word 97, 2000, XP files
• Database forms now support zooming
• Impress supports comments
• Import pivot tables from Microsoft Excel 2007 documents
• Improved sort, cell merging, and complex copy and paste features in Calc

OpenOffice.org 3.2 is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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Office and Windows XP Professional users can now upgrade to the latest and greatest Microsoft software suites with 50% off the retail price.

Bear in mind this offer is definitely aimed at businesses as it requires Microsoft’s Open Value Subscription system, where you pay for your licenses in cheap yearly instalments. With that said, the discounted price is really quite good: Windows XP and Vista users can upgrade to Windows 7 Professional for about $35. Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 users can upgrade to the latest ‘Office Professional Plus’ for about $91.

This upgrade plan is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses, but I can’t see anything that denies home users from taking advantage of the discount — if you’re savvy enough to work out the subscription system! Don’t forget this only applies to Professional licenses, i.e. you need to be upgrading from XP or Vista Professional, while most non-business users use the Home version.

It’s is a great deal for businesses aiming to upgrade their aging and antiquated systems to something new and shiny, so even if you can’t take advantage of the deal yourself, it’s worth sharing the news with someone who can.

The offer is valid until June 2010!

[via ZDNet]

The technique is simple and involves setting up 25-minute intervals for a given task and taking a short break at the end (five minutes or so). Every four intervals you take a slightly longer break, and the cycle begins again.

While the only supplies necessary to follow the technique are a timer, a piece of paper, and a pen or pencil, you can cut down on desktop clutter by using a program on your PC – like Keep Focused.

It’s a tiny, portable app which is as simple to use as Pomodoro itself. The white square is your “stop button” – click it to end a session. Click “play” to start a new session and tell Keep Focused what you’re going to work on. Move the miniscule toolbar anywhere you wish by clicking on the hand icon and dragging.

When a session is done, take a break and then start anew!

Keep Focused is currently an alpha release, but it works well. It’s a nice little productivity tool to add to your USB flash drive.

Screenpresso is tiny. I have no idea what it’s written in — maybe some newfangled .NET thing, but it sure doesn’t feel like the standard fare Windows application. The UI is all custom-looking and the app feels very lightweight.

Like most screenshot apps, Screenpresso sits in your system tray and waits for you to hit a hotkey. But once it takes the screenshot, it does something a bit different: it instantly saves it in its own folder, and then lets you very easily save it to another path with Ctrl-S. As you can see in the screenshot above, there’s a handy little “history” screen which lets you access the source files of all previous screenshots. So if you’ve messed anything up in editing, you can quickly revert to the original image.

That’s just one example for the general elegance of Screenpresso. It doesn’t do anything exceptional — it does far less than ZScreen, but that’s exactly why I keep coming back to it. By the way, that screenshot was not taken with Screenpresso, which evidently cannot take a screenshot of itself — how un-zen like.

The goodies include everything from slide backgrounds to animated text effects and charts. There are eight categorized download sets in all — and they’re all provided free of charge! You can also preview each category (such as the combined picture and text effects) before you download.

As is usually the case with free templates, some of the stuff is a little bit on the cheesey side. There’s still plenty of good content to be had, however, like the nice timeline slide in the header image.

If you have Silverlight installed, check out the freebies in action in a video clip suitably entitled “Everything in the video is a Powerpoint slide” after the break! You can download everything from this page.

Need some tips on creating an effective presentation? Check out our post highlighting 6 handy PowerPoint tips!
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This isn’t news to the crew at Wzor.net, of course, who have made a habit of putting leaked RC, beta, and RTM software from Microsoft on display for all to see. They’ve confirmed that Microsoft is already internally testing an RTM escrow build of Office 2010.

As a Microsoft spokesperson told NeoWin, “Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP). This is one of Microsoft’s planned milestones in the engineering process; however they do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly.”

Fortunately for eager testers, Microsoft’s own distribution plans won’t hold you back. Leaked RC builds are circulating on various torrent sites (and other P2P networks like eMule), so you can still find a copy to test if you’re OK with the associated risks.

We wouldn’t advise that, of course.
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1. Use the Lessig Method
All too often, PowerPoint presentations become bogged down in graphs, long quotes and giant chunks of text. My advice? Simplify, simplify, simplify. The simpler your presentation, the more memorable it will be. Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford University widely credited with nailing down the perfect presentation technique: extremely simple slides (though I think Lessig uses Apple Keynote, but no matter). Often Lessig’s slides will have only one or two words on them to emphasize what he wants his audience to focus on. Dick Hardt gave a presentation in this style and I highly suggest you watch that here. Of course, this method does require a bit of synchronizing and a lot of practicing. You don’t necessarily need to go as far as Lessig and Hardt do, but simplifying slides will be a huge help.

2. Get Inspired
Feeling stuck? Try searching SlideFinder to get some ideas for slide shows.

3. Go Opensource
Sometimes computers you are giving your presentation on do not have the latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint and file types can be incompatible. By carrying around a portable version of OpenOffice.org’s Impress slide show software sometimes this dilemma can be avoided.

4. Create with Style
Microsoft’s program could be a little simpler and a little more intuitive. Consider giving 280slides a whirl. This online tool features a strong and simple interface that can help you get more done, faster. And it’s free!

5. Host in the Cloud
Another way to avoid file type incompatibilities and difficulties opening files when you need them most is to host your .ppt file on SlideShare. This way, if anything happens (a file gets corrupted, your jump drive gets misplaced) you have an easy to access backup copy. Further, SlideShare also provides a Flash viewer for the ppt file so even if Microsoft PowerPoint refuses to open, you can still give a fullscreen presentation using this great technology.

6. Make it Dynamic
Let’s face it, PowerPoint presentations are getting somewhat dated just based on the medium itself. To really capture your audiences attention, try using the free online presentation tool, Prezi. Prezi creates impressive-looking presentations that zoom and pan and fly around your content. Getting used to the editor takes about 30 minutes to really master but after that things are pretty simple. Prezi hosts your finished creation and you can email this link to friends or colleagues. You can also download the file and launch it without any other software besides Flash which virtually all computers have.

7. Poll your Audience
PollEverywhere allows you to embed a poll into your PowerPoint and then allows the audience to answer your question using their phones. A great way to incorporate audience participation.

These techniques will save you time and will make your presentation stand out from the rest. Good luck!

Microsoft were quick to release a statement to the press, allaying any fears that Office 2007, or 2010, will become unavailable. Office 2010, we assume, will still be released on schedule, and new versions of Office and Word 2007 without the infringing XML technology will be made available before January 11 2010. i4i, if you didn’t know, is a company that specialises in database design and XML technology — they were the ones behind the first XML plugins for Office, and it now seems that Microsoft did rip them off.


Office 2010 doesn’t include the patent-infringing technology, so whether the resolution of this case will have any long-lasting effects remains to be seen. According to Reuters, Microsoft will need to pay the rather princely sum of $290 million to the patent-holders i4i, however. Pocket change: but with enough wrist-slapping, Microsoft does seem to be slowly falling into line.

It’s a logical feature to offer with any online service. Now, there is a limit – 2GB – but that ought to cover just about all your Docs data unless you have some uber-massive presentations stored there. Google figures it’s about enough room for 100,000 files or so. If you’ve got more than that, well, you probably love the cloud so much you wouldn’t want to move your files offline anyway.

They might as well start allowing bulk downloads. I’m sure they’d rather you do that than leave ‘em on Google’s servers and edit them with your Zoho apps, anyway.

[via Google Docs blog]

The latter is the case this morning, with CentrumXP.pl sharing the latest round of sneak-peeks at Office 2010. Posted are designs for four of the 78 six versions set to arrive in June of 2010.

In addition to showing off their gradients and puffy iconography, the boxes also spell out which apps are shipping in each version.

• Home and Student: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote
• Home and Business: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook
• Pro Academic: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access
• Professional: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access

As with Office 2007, the Home and Student edition can be licensed for use on three computers.

Check out larger versions of the boxes after the break, and share your take in the comments!

[via NeoWin]
Thanks to CentrumXP.pl [translate link] for the images!